Outdoor tasks, such as grooming and maintaining property, are commonly performed using outdoor power equipment, such as a riding lawn care mower. Such equipment uses relatively complex electrical and wiring systems to route functionality and power through complicated components. For example, lawn mowers typically have their electrical switches and circuits routed through the ignition switch in a complicated way that must be custom designed for each riding lawn mower model. The components of these systems are contingent on other components of the system. As such, current electrical and current wiring systems limit the flexibility of easily adding or removing components or features. For example, if a switch needs to be added to or removed from a current wiring system, such wiring system may have to be completely redesigned to include the switch because adding or removing the switch may require a new wiring harness, require modification of the complex routing of the wiring harness through the vehicle, and interfere with the functionality of the system due to the interdependency and inter-relationships of components. Furthermore, conventional wiring harnesses for riding lawn care vehicles become very expensive, complex, and difficult to route through the vehicle when one considers adding a lot of electrical functionality to the conventional wiring harness.
Moreover, current systems have limited capabilities in that these systems are not functionally programmable or re-programmable. If a system is programmed for certain functions, but different operations are desired, a completely new electrical system must be designed, thereby resulting in a relatively inflexible system. Redesigning such system would be expensive, cumbersome and inefficient.
Additionally, switches in existing wiring systems mostly remain as an open circuit until its function is realized, which then will close the circuit. However, if such switch becomes inoperable, the switch will likely emulate an open circuit. Such open circuit state may also be the normal standby state of the switch. As such, existing systems may not know whether a switch needs to be replaced/repaired or is just in a normal standby state.
Additionally, current wiring systems do not have data collection/communication capabilities, and thus, current systems do not know the working status of components of the electrical system or parts of the riding lawn mower.